Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

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Why was this downvoted? I failed a class and took the online version once so I got to see both sides.

The online version had:

1) lots of busywork for the sake of busywork (to make up for attendance?)

2) much poorer instruction. Like everything felt like it was written by someone (really a group of people) who didn’t understand the subject very well, which was strange because the in person class was taught by a DR. with a very good understand and a strong passion for it.

3) no organic classroom interaction, people making friends that way have to be an extreme exception. It almost felt like this was actively discouraged to avoid a liability? I’m not sure, but that’s a huge part of the value of going to class that’s totally gone now.

4) and because of that no real discussion (you had discussion boards but those are more like public essays than real conversations.)

The only reason it’s better than just reading a book and doing exercises is that all the administrators recognize you’ve done it, the whole situation is just really dumb.

It was downvoted, because many people here want in person classes to be useless waste of time. They don't want to hear they are better then online. That is mostly due to high price of price of us college.

But imo, content issues are fixable, it just takes way more time. Good online courses with good content and good exercises will become more common.

What will be harder is to simulate the social effects and mutual communication, that will be fixable too in time. That will however require also changes outside of school - people will have to learn how to find friendships and communities without institutional support of school.

I think that if just the classes were live, no/few exceptions, and the student to teacher ratio was kept low, that would be a big step.

Online courses I've taken have been much better than in-person courses.

Online courses have several advantages:

1) The lecturer can prepare a video, refine it, and have others review it before it makes it to the students. Errors can be corrected and annotations can be added.

2) Quizzes, tests, and projects can be effectively randomized to dissuade cheating (see coursera courses).

3) Other resources can be linked directly in the material.

4) Written information for the courses can be intermixed with video lectures.

5) Asking questions is easy and doesn't disrupt the rest of the class.

6) You learn at your own rate.

Most of my more challenging courses at university (math and engineering) did not have any discussion anyway, and the instruction was extremely poor. If Khan Academy or Coursera had existed at the time, I'd have done much better using those courses than learning from my actual professors.

That doesn’t sound like an undergrad online course. Universities could make courses with all of those features but IME and looking at what my friends have seen in theirs they don’t. I’m not sure if it’s an institutional requirement or if it’s because they know they can get away without it and don’t bother.

Most of that is because those are hard requirements to fulfill for most professors. Video production is pretty difficult to do well. The university I teach for basically offered no help in that realm in our transition. They basically just told us we had to transition to online in two days, gave us some bullcrap professional development on how to use Canvas, and then fed us to the wolves.

Make sure to blame the university, not the professors. We're trying our best with almost no help.

Did you say that you took an online class once? And based on that one experience you have seen both sides?

Just askin'

Surely you realize that this is not a universal experience...

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